1. Field
Movable coil scanner systems and methods may be beneficial to a variety of testing environments and processes. For example, testing of vehicles such as automobiles may benefit from movable coil scanner systems that are configured to perform magnetic immunity testing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional magnetic field generation and multi-coil use is mainly in two areas. A first area is calibration. In this area, coil configurations of specific geometries, for example, Helmholtz geometries, can be used to generate well behaved and predictable magnetic fields that can be used to calibrate magnetic field probes.
A second area is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this area, coil configurations are used to generate well-calibrated localized magnetic field gradients across tissue specimens for medical imaging.
In these areas, generally fixed-coil configurations and small scanning volumes often are employed. Moreover, in the case of an MRI, typically the device under test is moved through the coil, rather than the coils being moved with respect to the test subject. For the case of calibration coils neither the device being calibrated nor the coils are moved.
Likewise, applications like MRI systems do not provide a direct magnetic field feedback mechanism. Instead such systems depend on the weak radiation radio frequency signal from the relaxation of hydrogen protons, which is proportional to the magnetic field the sample has been exposed to. Thus, MRI systems do not include a free space sensor or array of free space sensors placed within the test volume for magnetic field monitoring.